Once the polling stations are closed, tallying takes place. The electronic tallying process is done publicly on the ballot tracking web page. To visualize the process imagine that all the votes on the ballot tracking web page are envelopes, and each envelope is closed with a lock. The tallying process consists of two steps that correspond to:
1) Randomly shuffling all the locked envelopes on the ballot tracking web page (changing their locks at the same time). Then, when the shuffling step is over,
2) Opening all the locks so that the shuffled envelopes can be read as clear text.
At the end of this process everyone can read the envelopes’ content, but no one can link the opened envelopes with the encrypted ballots. Thus, everyone can verify the election’s results while preserving voters’ privacy.
More specifically, we mix all envelopes using a verifiable mix-net, where the verification is done using zero-knowledge proofs. The locks on the envelopes belong to a group of trustees (that should include, e.g., representatives from the government, the various political parties, the judiciary system and human rights organizations), and after mixing the envelopes, the group of trustees collectively remove the locks from the mixed envelopes, making the set of votes public in plain text.
The Tallying Process
Once the polling stations are closed, tallying takes place. The electronic tallying process is done publicly on the ballot tracking web page. To visualize the process imagine that all the votes on the ballot tracking web page are envelopes, and each envelope is closed with a lock. The tallying process consists of two steps that correspond to:
1) Randomly shuffling all the locked envelopes on the ballot tracking web page (changing their locks at the same time). Then, when the shuffling step is over,
2) Opening all the locks so that the shuffled envelopes can be read as clear text.
At the end of this process everyone can read the envelopes’ content, but no one can link the opened envelopes with the encrypted ballots. Thus, everyone can verify the election’s results while preserving voters’ privacy.
More specifically, we mix all envelopes using a verifiable mix-net, where the verification is done using zero-knowledge proofs. The locks on the envelopes belong to a group of trustees (that should include, e.g., representatives from the government, the various political parties, the judiciary system and human rights organizations), and after mixing the envelopes, the group of trustees collectively remove the locks from the mixed envelopes, making the set of votes public in plain text.